Editor’s Note: Occasionally, our managing editor likes to write about film. Today, Chance reviews “Under The Skin,” which is playing at Film Streams now through May 8.
There are very few laugh-out-loud moments in Under The Skin.
The majority of the film is blank and cold. Both in the demeanor and personality of its one and only true character, an unnamed woman played by Scarlett Johansson, and in the sheer temperature of the rainy Scottish winter and spring. It’s cold the way Nicolas Winding Refn’s recent movies, Drive and Only God Forgives, have been hot. Director and co-writer Jonathan Glazer is all in on blues and whites and browns, coats and scarves. Whipping wind should receive higher billing in this film than whoever appears second to Johannsson somewhere an entire row of empty chairs behind her on the cast depth chart.
The few laughs come at the expense of humanity’s sexual expectations, namely the expectations of heterosexual men. Like a hair-gelled nightclub rat who is still dancing shirtless with himself moments before he is devoured by the trap Johansson’s unnamed protagonist has set for him.
The more challenging chuckle is a beach scene, something like the eeriest, most slogging Bond Girl introduction imaginable. It’s horrifying and hilarious when Johansson traipses through low tide in fur-lined boots — when she could stay dry and unimpeded just a few feet further up — after watching two people and a dog drown. A toddler wails for its parents and the camera waves the checkered flag for Johannson to descend a water-logged catwalk, swaying hips and acid-washed jeans on a mission. This is the bizarre, calloused, uncontextualized sexuality of Under The Skin.
The first half of the two-act Glazer movie is a passenger-seat (or dashboard camera) study of a huntress and her habits. The unnamed woman is preying on Scottish men from behind the wheel of her boxy, white van, asking them for directions and then offering rides.
It’s a trap, but the stakes for her are nothing. If the woman fails to lure a man into the car or finds he might have a family or girlfriend awaiting his return, she simply cuts him loose from the line. In Glasgow, Johansson speaks with a British accent, instantly proving her own superficial kind of foreignness. The woman attempts suggestiveness in tight pants and low-cut pink top, but not refinement or physical temptation. That would take effort she doesn’t need to exert.
When she succeeds in entrapping a man, it’s usually someone deeply overconfident, no idea how outgunned he is by Johansson in her ease of flirtation. She turns on and off a level of interest in the men that’s soft, but aggressively inquisitive, without really laying a hand on them.
And then who knows what happens in Under The Skin, honestly?
After this point, it’s a discussion of spolier semantics. Is the woman an alien, and what happens to the men when they sink beneath the floor of the glimmering, black pre-coital room to which she takes them? The film, based on the novel by Michael Faber, has no definitive answers, and so the practical discussion of plot ends here. That is, even if the ultimate mystery and purposelessness of whatever the woman and her silent, motorcycle-riding companion do with these bodies renders the whole movie floating and a bit moot. Not unlike what the milling crowds of humans on the streets must look like to someone alien. Prior to any fantastical elements being introduced, though the presentation of any such events in the movie has no special stage for what we’d think of as fantasy, the interactions are Camus-esque. People talk and no one hears. People are in danger and another person is distracted by waves crashing on the beach.
In a way, Under The Skin is so blank (“boring” would not be an unjustifiable accusation) that the interesting analysis probably starts one level outside the movie’s events. This makes two recent films, with a nod to Her and excluding her performances as Black Widow in the Marvel movies, in which Scarlett Johansson’s romantic lead-ness been unconventionally bodied or a little malformed. So in the wake of commentary on Anthony Lane’s “creepy” New Yorker profile and an exclusive “sex symbol” portion of her Wikipedia page, there’s some sort of conversation going on in this movie with public perception. Perhaps, that Johansson’s potential for on-screen sexuality is now pinned onto more abstract roles. But any conversation, from Under The Skin’s mouth, is in a foreign tongue. Her character has memorized every beat of heterosexual male objectification, making the capture of these men a foregone conclusion.
Actually, in terms of the way Johannsson and beautiful movie stars are objectified and sexualized — quick aside: in looking for proper screenshots of this movie, Google Image was short of official stills and brimming with grainy “Scarlett gets naked!” pictures from the film — Under The Skin cuts completely to the chase. Sexuality, flirtatiousness is the intercourse unto itself when actual sex won’t occur. Not between Johansson’s character and the men. Not between a possessive, groping audience and an actor. The only people not in on the joke are the voyeurs. In her black room, Johansson’s character toe-heel steps backward, doffing one item of clothing at a time, until the man is entrenched. When he’s submerged under the floor, she puts the same clothes back on without a hint of ceremony. The preview is the sex and it is emotionless. There is no propogation of the illusion of mutual fulfillment.
Visually, Under The Skin feels constructed by someone who appears to understand both everything and nothing about the makeup of our world. On the one hand, there’s the expertise to orchestrate a ritualistic trap of the people, an expert in behavior. But in nature, Johannsson is lost, and the camera amazed. Indeed, one of Glazer’s finest shots in the film is a bristling, zoomed out shot of a Scottish timberline, green towers bent backward in relentless wind. Couple that with the Planet Earth-esque opening shots of a human eye and a microscopic speck of light. There is a wondrous admiration of the earth’s scope here.
The camera’s only bias toward overt artisticness is science. And then when it comes to art, to love, to people, it chooses to be scientific, calloused.
Regarding a few, let’s say, eager Kubrick comparisons, Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) may already have the skills to grate and tense shoulders like a Kubrick, but there’s no recipe for a hit (even a modest one) here. Other than Johansson’s attachment to the project, there’s not even an ingredient for it. The screenplay voids itself of Kubrick’s sense of fun, even in any sadistic, puppeteering vigor.
Still, the man who first made his name on Radiohead music videos is masterful with sound placement and sound editing. Johansson’s boots land on the ground soggily even if their pace is crisp. Van door slams are muted in foreboding. The main overture of the movie is a creaky, peaking violin number, something that would play on a loop in the entryway of a Gothic mansion. At one point, there is the distinct tick-tock of a watch that no one in the scene is wearing.
Now, once more for the people leaving the theater with faces scrunched up, remove Johannsson from this movie and it becomes pure arthouse fare, full of utterly unknown faces, something entirely rooted in images, to see what effect they have on you. The movie is in its own van, trying to study you as a moviegoer. These trees, this assembly line beltway of magma and dissolved guts, this entirely black room with selective trap door sludge … what do they make you think of?
It’s a tantalizing experience, even if joy — or enjoyment — are not ready possibilities, as Under The Skin registers no such emotions. At the moments you find it boring, it almost certainly registers the same indifference toward you.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.